To an English nobleman, who, in the course of an interview, remarked,
'My father was a Minister of England, and twice Viceroy of Ireland,'
the old Dutchman answered, 'And my father was a shepherd!' It was not
pride rebuking pride; it was the ever-present fact which would not
have been worth mentioning but for the suggestion of the antithesis.
He too was a shepherd, and is--a peasant. It may be that he knows
what would be right and good for his people, and it may be not; but
it is sure that he realizes that to educate would be to emancipate,
to broaden their views would be to break down the defences of their
prejudices, to let in the new leaven would be to spoil the old bread,
to give unto all men the rights of men would be to swamp for ever the
party which is to him greater than the State. When one thinks on the
one-century history of the people, much is seen that accounts for
their extraordinary love of isolation, and their ingrained and
passionate aversion to control; much too that draws to them a world
of sympathy. And when one realizes the old Dopper President hemmed in
once more by the hurrying tide of civilization, from which his people
have fled for generations--trying to fight both fate and
Nature--standing up to stem a tide as resistless as the eternal
sea--one sees the pathos of the picture. But this is as another
generation may see it.

To-day we are too close--so close that the meaner details, the
insincerity, the injustice, the barbarity--all the unlovely touches
that will by-and-by be forgotten--sponged away by the gentle hand of
time, when only the picturesque will remain.

In order to understand the deep, ineradicable aversion to English
rule which is in the heart and the blood and the bones of every Boer,
and of a great many of their kindred who are themselves British